McAfee maps out malware hotspots

Security firm McAfee has announced the results of a research report that creates a global map of the riskiest places to surf and search on the internet.

The McAfee SiteAdvisor Mapping the Mal Web report analyses and ranks 265 top-level domains including .jp for Japan, .fr for France and .com.

This global portrait estimates that internet users make more than 550 million clicks to risky websites every month, and that even relatively safe domains like .de for Germany and .co.uk for the UK account for millions of risky clicks.

"McAfee has created a guide book to the web's most dangerous top-level domains," said Mark Maxwell, senior product manager for McAfee's Consumer and Small Business unit.

"When it comes to safety, it turns out that the web is no different than the physical world. There are safe neighbourhoods and safe web domains, and there are places no one should ever visit."

The report provides 'red', 'yellow' or 'green' ratings to sites and search results based on proprietary tests of millions of sites representing more than 95 per cent of the trafficked web.

'Red' ratings are given to risky sites that fail one or more of McAfee's tests for adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spam, excessive pop-ups or strong affiliations with other 'red' rated sites.

'Yellow' ratings are given to sites which pass McAfee's safety tests but which still have nuisances, such as excessive pop-ups, warranting a user advisory. 'Green' rated sites pass all of these tests.

The most risky large country domains are Romania with 5.6 per cent risky sites and Russia with 4.5 per cent risky sites. These country domains are also the most likely to host exploit or 'drive-by-download' sites.

Some web activities, like registering at a site or downloading a file, are significantly more risky when performed at certain domains.

For example, giving an email address to a random .info domain results in a massive 73.2 per cent chance of receiving spam as a result.

See also:

Foreign characters pass web test

Internet test finds additional language characters could be added to domain names  13 Mar 2007

Internationalised domain names inch forward

Non-ASCI characters clear Icann test  09 Mar 2007

Worldwide surfers hit 747m in January

Global internet audience up 10 per cent  07 Mar 2007

Bagle still the malware boss

Three years on and email worm still going strong  09 Mar 2007

Symantec clears Vista on malware

Not a secure system, just more sturdy than previous Windows versions  01 Mar 2007

Storm Worm crashes February malware charts

Malware disguises itself to look like harmless code  02 Mar 2007

McAfee touts risk management panacea

New security strategy bundles several technologies in a single suite  16 Oct 2006

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